The CAE Perspective: Audit Plan Priorities, Keys to Career Success, and Talent Management Strategies

“Shannon Urban, Hasbro: I think what attracts people to a company like ours at Hasbro is flexibility — and that we try to have some fun along the way as well. We work for a toy company, you have to have a little bit of fun, right? We try to do that by providing good work-life balance. I think that’s super critical for everyone today. We operate in a hybrid model coming back from the pandemic. Before Covid, it was a five day a week kind of environment, but we’ve opened that up and said, be where you need to be when you need to be there. We think that we need people to be in the office. We think there’s value in that, so we’re in about two days a week and everyone works from wherever they need to be on those other days. We also have half-day Fridays year round as a company, which doesn’t hurt either.”

“Carl Hatfield, Protiviti: One thing we’ve seen implemented a little bit more recently at some large audit shops is resource pooling, where you have more junior folks open to a resource pool where they get to work on many different types of audits. There’s a core skill set, but they also have the opportunity to work on different lines of business, with different people, and on different entities and risk items within the organization. Later, they have the opportunity to graduate that resource pool and expand into further depth within certain areas.”

“Diana Pagliarini, State Street: I took this role during the pandemic, and stepping in at a very volatile time I tried to just remind myself to focus on the controllable things, but it’s important to walk the talk. Joining a group of 300 individuals, it took me a year and a half, but I met with every single person one-on-one for half an hour to get to know them a little bit. Then now as every new person comes into our department, they get a one-on-one with me and they get an email the first week from me welcoming them, introducing our strategy, and looking forward to an upcoming conversation. I think retention starts on the first day.”

“Diana Pagliarini, State Street: The first thing I’m thinking about is around change: the change that’s coming and the change that’s happened. The great resignation didn’t just affect internal audit, it affected certain businesses. Things perhaps that have been stable for some time may now be disruptive. The steady stuff is worth a look to see, can you get a metric on turnover above a certain level in different parts of the organization? That’s your ongoing risk assessment. I think that’s really a key area of focus and an opportunity both the way forward and the way back.”

“Carl Hatfield, Protiviti: Around company transformations and emerging technology, with organizational change management and M&A activity it’s important to understand how the organization is changing and how it will be utilizing some of the newer technologies — cloud, IoT, blockchain, AI. All these newer technologies organizations are starting to roll out, looking at it not just from an overall impact, whether it’s operational or financial, but certainly reputational aspects.”

“Shannon Urban, Hasbro: I was joking with someone that I’m not sure why we even bothered to put an audit plan together this year because we go through our process, we do the enterprise risk assessment on behalf of the company. and we build our plan off of that risk assessment in the fall, present it and get it approved by the audit committee in December. I’m going to venture a guess that 40% of it is probably irrelevant right now as I look at what’s happening and just the change in the organization. If there’s one theme or thread that goes through pretty much everything I think we will cover this year in internal audit, it’s that change and transformation.”